ACI-015: An Agent's Reports Are Claims

Thesis

An agent has no clock and no felt duration, so a timestamp it types is invented whole and looks exactly like a real one. Take every stamp from a clock read in the command that writes it, and annotate or remove one nobody read; never improve it. An agent that narrates claim, error and correction reads as unreliable whether or not its end state is sound, so the check goes before the claim.

Story

In August 2026 Intent recorded an agent whose status file gave a check-in time about 99 minutes ahead of true UTC. It matched neither date nor date -u on the machine, so it came from no clock at all (Intent@0be6bd3d1, 2026-08-14). The commit that made this a rule separates two failures. A wrong clock is off by a constant and stays consistent with itself. An invented stamp is off by nothing in particular, and nobody can tell it from a real one by looking. A language model can read a clock through a command but has none of its own, so, in the commit's words, "there is nothing for it to be approximately right about".